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With respect, I don't think we ever promised anything except to keep improving Linux support, did we ?

The "amazing new codebase" was the 3D stack, not the rest of the driver and AFAIK that's the part everyone is upset about losing from fglrx, isn't it ?

We aren't dropping support for your hardware, as much as saying "from this point on we will be supporting your hardware via the open source driver, which we just spent a pile of time, money and effort on...".

Which is exactly what you should be doing so thank you very, very much.

For those of you that are actually complaining, here are the facts....
1: The user base for the open drivers is about to grow substantially.
2: Many of those users are bound to be programmers, primarily due to the fact that Linux tends to attract that sort of crowd.
3: Many of those programmers are going to find problems with the drivers as they are today, because well, they are incomplete.
4: Many of those unsatisfied programmers are going to do what they can to get the driver working best for them, and that helps you.

Open source development is primarily a process of elimination. This is its strength and its weakness. Strength because it facilitates a --MUCH-- larger developer base then any proprietary effort could. These developers that will be fixing there own problems couldnt do the same using a closed driver. And while they're doing it, many other people will benefit.

The goal behind open development is to organize (Organize being the key word here) as many developers working together as possible. The only effective way of increasing the base of developers is to increase the user base substantially. This effort is going to do exactly that.

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All in all I am quite pleased. I finally managed to achieve my main obejective, to have:
*stability
*suspend,hibernation
*good video playback
*compiz
all at the same time.
I would say that the open source radeon driver is not bad at all!

I just went to look at the status of the radeon driver for r500 series & you're right, it looks really good! I'd switch drivers right now if powerplay was working.

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Actually I would not think it's coding what is needed (well that is needed, but end users can't typically code). Anyways most people do not have the ability to do that.

What is needed from most people is going to be feedback.

For example:

Say you have a video card that freezes when you try to do 3D. Who is going to help you fix it if you sit on your hands and don't file reports or do anything about it?

NOBODY.

NOBODY IS GOING TO FIX ANYTHING IF THEY ARE UNAWARE OF IT.

---------------------------------

What is needed is the ability for people to run lots of tests on different hardware with the same exact software setup. So that developers can know easier which hardware is the problem and stuff like that.

They don't even need to be particularly good bug reports. Numbers make up for it.

So say you get 300 bug reports from different people. They are shitty bug reports, but you know the user and the hardware. Well if 200 of those people are having problems with the same chipset on their cards... then that helps to narrow down the problem significantly, right?

SOOOOO.....

What I am getting at is this:

Is there any Live Linux distribution out there right now for testing video hardware?

I want a Live Linux cdrom that is built with the latest and greatest open source drivers and comes with a bunch of benchmarking and hardware testing tools installed. So that a individual can download the image, drop it on a USB key or on a CDROM and then just engage in a bunch of testing.

Something quick and easy that does not require a bunch of Linux skills or require installing software over a existing system. Something even a typical Windows user can handle.

If that does not exist then I want to make one. I want to take Phoronix's benchmark tools and make a live CD/USB Key with the latest and greatest X Windows and OpenGL drivers.

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Wow... so much negativity here. While I understand that people are frustrated at AMD for the problems each person has had with their drivers... there seems to be no recognition from what I understand are real challenges supporting the quirks of various distributions, kernels, and a changing graphics stack. Really for all the architectural issues people are trying to address in the rest of the stack, it's impressive what they do put out. (Windows, with it's slow rate of change and single distribution (sort of) seems like a dream).

And what is AMD's reaction to this landscape - they open their documentation and produce an open source driver. OK - it's not perfect yet, but they have grabbed onto philosophy that many feel is the better way to go, and are making that the key driver. And as the Linux landscape evolves... the open source driver should evolve right along with it.

Does it make more sense to fix the old driver? or work on the open source one and get it up to snuff sooner (which, it sounds like it is doing pretty good)

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As they do not provide updates for legacy drivers this will lead to endless user supported kernel patches for 9-3 driver. You can guess that i really hate that. If you do a Debian Lenny based distribution running latest kernel and fully without ATIs support that a dramtic issue what they are doing. Except Xserver 1.6+ support for 71.xx driver series Nv supports all GPU - maybe not with added extra drivers. But those are old DX7 cards, R500 is a DX10 card and they drop support for everything below a DX10.1. Somebody should _sue_ ATI, really thats unfair if you can not use a newer Xserver, DRM, Mesa on a specific distro. The driver is not even in a fully working state and then drop support? Thats absolutely ridiculous!

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Wow... so much negativity here. While I understand that people are frustrated at AMD for the problems each person has had with their drivers... there seems to be no recognition from what I understand are real challenges supporting the quirks of various distributions, kernels, and a changing graphics stack. Really for all the architectural issues people are trying to address in the rest of the stack, it's impressive what they do put out. (Windows, with it's slow rate of change and single distribution (sort of) seems like a dream).

And what is AMD's reaction to this landscape - they open their documentation and produce an open source driver. OK - it's not perfect yet, but they have grabbed onto philosophy that many feel is the better way to go, and are making that the key driver. And as the Linux landscape evolves... the open source driver should evolve right along with it.

Does it make more sense to fix the old driver? or work on the open source one and get it up to snuff sooner (which, it sounds like it is doing pretty good)

so in other words : whine whine, fuss fuss, it's always somebody else is at fault.

If you expected the worst, and did nothing to prevent that worst from occuring, either by getting involved or contacting AMD directly, what you say comes off as pathetic excuses, and nothing more.

***

okay. edit. After walking away from the keyboard for a while, this just came off as incomplete. I'm going to try to articulate what exactly it is about h2's stance that just completely ticks me off.

For starters, it's the baldface stance on the status of the drivers. Okay, at one point the OpenGL drivers were horrible. AMD/ATi fixed the acceleration problems. The list of bugfixes with each driver went from one or two bugs, to five or six, to seven or eight, to ten or more bugs squashed on average.

However, that wasn't good enough for people. Open source users cried for an open source strategy. So ATI, then AMD came up with one, releasing internal code documentation and paying for the development of an Open Licensed driver, RadeonHD.

Again, people complained because RadeonHD was competing with X.org ATi, and X.org ATi was seeing faster development due to their adoption of AMD tools, while RadeonHD went after the less AMD dependent reverse-engineering method. So the RadeonHD devs finally started using AtomBIOS.

That still wasn't good enough. People wanted parts of Fglrx opened up, so AMD said yes. Then people wanted the installer scripts opened up, so AMD said yes.

And now that AMD has pretty much answered every single question, rewritten the drivers from scratch, and damn near hand catered to every single demand brought forward from the Open-Source communities, it's still not enough. After distribution maintainers railed against AMD/ATi for lack of control over the scripts, and the inability to add more scripts for each distribution, now it's suddenly the opposite. AMD isn't doing enough internal testing. It's no longer the distribution maintainers problem. It's AMD's problem.

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Let me add something here. About 70% of this thread is people whining about this step. It gets kind of tiring after a while to read all the negativity.

Basically, what bridgman keeps saying here holds true. The FOSS drivers will rather soon (once the new graphics stack stabilises) reach about 60-70% performance of fglrx, which is _more than reasonable_ for something that is maintainable for a very long time. For the remaining 30-40% for your gpu you'd have to roll up your sleeves and get to work -- which is again, more than fair.

I mean, this is becoming ridiculous. The specs are there for pretty much everything and for everyone to see. When they weren't, people whined about AMD. Now people (even if it's technically a different group of people) still whine about AMD doing the _right_ step to be able to deliver overall better performance with fglrx (even though whether it's needed anymore is questionable). All in all, can't you appreciate AMD's efforts?

I mean, saying "my next card is nvidia" just doesn't cut it, if you work according to that logic, you might as well be using Windows.

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I mean, saying "my next card is nvidia" just doesn't cut it, if you work according to that logic, you might as well be using Windows.

Expecting on par performance levels of the card when in another OS in not unreasonable at all. People don't purchase video cards for 70% of it's potential. People will buy and upgrade cards when there is a 20% increase in performance though.

Somebody should _sue_ ATI, really thats unfair if you can not use a newer Xserver, DRM, Mesa on a specific distro. The driver is not even in a fully working state and then drop support? Thats absolutely ridiculous!

Again, we aren't dropping support we are shifting our support to the open source driver.

It would all seem more clear if we had hired open source developers today rather than starting a year ago, but we didn't want to shift support to open source until the drivers were in reasonably decent shape (which, in fairness, I think they are for 3xx-5xx GPUs).